


Conviction

by quicksparrows



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Guns, kinda shippy if you're into that thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-08-14 09:11:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8007448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quicksparrows/pseuds/quicksparrows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's Mercy's time, considering what she did to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conviction

**Author's Note:**

> I'm new here. Timeline fuckery because if Blizzard doesn't care, then I don't have to either.
> 
> I kind of hemmed and hawed over this piece for a while. Working out characterizations haha. Will revisit these characters in some other piece, I think.

.

 

 

 

He finds Mercy in her lab.

In truth, there isn't anywhere else she would be. Reaper has never known her to go out much, but he's watched her these past few weeks and she's more bound to her work than ever. The evenings out for drinks with coworkers are history, and the water cooler is silent. She talks with her interns and colleagues, hears their ideas and lays down her own, _always_ the magnanimous genius, but there's something missing.

And he notices, after two days of spying from the shadows, that she doesn't talk about Overwatch. There's no trace of her history in this place at all, beyond the similar subjects of research. If the Valkyrie System still exists, it's nowhere in the facility that he can find. With Overwatch dismantled and its former agents relegated to other lives and purposes, Valkyrie is offline. She's been free to place all her time and energy into her lab, even if it's a modest lab compared to her former ones.

Reaper can only assume her life is more peaceful this way, the way she wanted it to be all those years ago. Her dream was a world where Overwatch was no longer necessary, and to her great fortune, she now lives in a world where Overwatch is almost gone. 

If he kills her today, then they'll be that much closer to a world where Overwatch doesn't exist at all.

It won't absolve her of her crimes, but he'll sure feel good about it.

So Reaper watches security change, and their numbers reduce for the night. He watches the employees wrap up and head out for the evening, and the interns put in a few more hours before going home, too. Eventually, all that's left is Mercy, sitting and reading in the break room for hours. Watching her is easier than watching Winston –– that damned ape moved around so much more, possessed an animal's sense of looming danger –– but he'd had a more complicated history with her. 

Mercy stays at work late, and Reaper watches the entire time, waiting. He wonders, idly, if she even sleeps. 

But sometime around midnight, Reaper decides that it's time.

He floats down to her level as a wraith, black smoke unfurling under black robes, but when she sees him out of the corner of her eye too late –– she's perceptive but she's slow. By time she has turned, eyes narrowing to scrutinize his ambiguous form, he is bearing down on her, dark and swift and suddenly corporeal again. 

The second he gets a boot on her, he knows she's as weak today as she was at her prime. She yowls as he slams her to the wall, but she has no defense against him. She tries to swing, but he wears body armor, and it is easy to cow her: he puts a gun in her face and moves his finger to the trigger. After that, she doesn't move, save for her eyes moving to his. 

She looks at him as though she can see right through his mask, and he _hesitates._

Why does he hesitate? Did he want a _last word_ in or something?

"Gabriel," she says, as if her head isn't ringing from bouncing against the concrete wall. She sounds _pleasant_ , even, if not a little breathless. Surprised to see him. Fair enough, though –– up close, her porcelain face looks unnerving, almost _metallic,_ like there are little nanomachines in her pores.

That's what makes him hesitate. He hasn't seen her in a few years and now she looks like a science project.

 _She's not even real,_ he thinks, suddenly. She has reason to not be afraid of having her head blown off. If he choked her or riddled her with bullets, would she even feel it? 

"Doc," he hisses. 

She purses her lips a little, but she doesn't quiver. In fact, she draws herself up a little taller behind the barrel, and she raises a hand slowly to push the gun away. He lets her. What would the point of shooting her be? In fact, she might even relish a chance to upgrade herself. Considering what she's done to him –– god, is _he_ real? –– then who can say what else she's done to herself?

"Here to take my files?" she asks.

"How did you know?" he asks.

"Winston recalled us last week," she says. She smiles, and his blood boils. "In light of Overwatch's return, did you think I wasn't expecting you?"

Reaper feels the spit slide around in his mouth, and he puts the gun back in her face, right against her cheek. The barrel digs against her cheekbone, but she doesn't resist at all.

"You always have to rub it in," he says.

"It's just the simple truth, Gabriel," she says.

"It's _Reaper,_ " he hisses.

She smiles, and once more, she brushes the gun from her face with a firm hand.

"There's no need for that. Why don't we go to the lab?" she says. "We'll relax and chat. Like old times."

"You're going to let me, a wanted terrorist, into your lab? One of the only remaining former-Overwatch labs?" he sneers.

"I wouldn't have offered if I wasn't serious about it," she says, and there's the slightest little quirk in her eyebrows. She's not stupid, and she never has been, even if her geniality makes people think so sometimes.

"I'm leaving with your hard drive," he warns her. "And you'll be dead, if there's anything left in you to kill."

She just smiles again, and he almost thinks of her as Angela.

_Almost._

 

* * *

 

Her lab is closed down for the night, and all is quiet but her heels on the tile. She walks unfettered only because he lets her. 

She drifts ahead of him to the small touch screen embedded in the wall. It makes soft noises as she taps controls, and the lights fade up. A few years ago, they just clicked on or off. It strikes Reaper as sad that with all that has happened, she's taken the time to install some damned dimmers. Couldn't she be working to undo the damage she's done?

"You don't need to turn them all on," he says. "It's just the two of us, and I'm not going to be here long."

She glances at him sidelong.

"Still fond of skulking around in the dark, I see," she says, but she doesn't touch the other banks of lights. She starts across the room again, moving from one halo of light to the next, and he follows, _skulking_ around the shadows. Her and her dumb old jokes, her petty nostalgia. He'd seen her bend her blonde head to a friend more than once and said something like: _I can't count how many times I've gotten in late only to see him sitting in darkness; he was so fixated on whatever he was doing that he didn't realize the sun set!_

"It's where I'm most comfortable," he says.

"I figured," she says. She pauses, looks back at him. He hates how doe-y those eyes can be. "I was thinking about you the other day, you know."

"That's surprising," he growls. "You're normally thinking about _other_ people."

That smile tugs at her lips again.

"That was a long time ago," she says. "Don't be jealous."

"I'm not."

As if he _could_ be.

She picks up a book; it's dog-eared and sad looking, the blue and yellow cover about ready to fall off. She holds it up so he can see the title. _Life After Death_. He hates it instantly.

"Have you read it?"

He gives her a blank look, but it's hidden by his mask. Mercy seems to know, though. Maybe she's enhanced her eyes recently, allowed herself the ability to see through solid objects. You never know with Mercy.

"I suppose not. But have you ever heard the story of Satoshi Oishi?" Mercy asks. Her mouth is weird around the name: her accent is all wrong for it, too heavy. When he doesn't reply, she continues: "I read his case studies decades ago, but after your incident with Winston, I wanted to read his story again. The author tells it from such a human perspective."

"And?" Reaper asks, even if he doesn't want to give her the satisfaction of him taking interest.

"He was in a terrible accident, not unlike yours. He suffered from uranium radiation, and the neutron beams destroyed his cells' ability to regenerate. Terrible, truly terrible –– there was no way to fix that, back then." She takes a few steps towards him but still appraises him from a distance. "He suffered for a long time. Longer than any man should."

"He probably looks better than me," Reaper says.

She laughs, high and musical. It's an all-body sort of laugh, her shoulders rising and the apples of her cheeks high and rosy.

"Perhaps at the time!" she says. "But I fixed you right up, didn't I?"

Reaper doesn't remember what he looked like, but he knows it was bad. He hadn't felt like he'd had a body at all, like every inch of him had been melted away until all that remained were frazzled nerve endings –– in his mind's eye, he was a head on a cloud of nerves, all of them lit up in agony. When he hadn't felt it, floating in and out of consciousness, he'd seen it reflected on the nurses and doctors' faces. Seen their shaking hands as they wrote on his charts, at least until his flesh sloughed off –– when he stopped looking real to them, they'd had no problem lording over his bedside like he was a science project.

His new body would be a glorious marvel to anyone disfigured from a car crash, or plagued by a lifetime of debilitating illness, or any skinny geek dreaming of being a superhero. For Reaper, however, it is a slap in the face. He hadn't spent his entirely life crafting a body and skill representative of his station and commitment only to have it replaced by parts off a factory line. Biotic parts, but parts nonetheless. He hadn't torn his biceps to grow the muscle back bigger and broader just to make being incorporeal his best strength.

He hadn't worked for _this._

Mercy gives up on getting a response out of him, as she often did before their falling out.

"I may not be a plastic surgeon, but my work wasn't terrible," Mercy says, but she surely can't believe that. She _can't_. Her eyes drop and he thinks she must _pretend_ she didn't bring him back only to destroy what was left of his humanity. She teases anyway: "And you've taken such care of it! I wish you'd let me fix your face more, but the rest is very nice.."

He'd beg to differ if it wouldn't feel so degrading.

"Nice?" he growls.

"Nice," she repeats. She casts a clinical look over him, far more appraising than admiring, and he's not sure why he even cares what she thinks. _Neither_ nice nor ugly would please him. He _hates_ her, hates what she's done to him, hates her vanity, hates that she would even call him _nice_.

"Does _nice_ ever apply to me?" he asks.

Reaper feels his teeth start to ache, he grits them so hard.  He is old and pieced together and he feels like couldn't be uglier even if they used catgut instead of microscopic lasers to stitch him back together. In this form, he is an aberration of nature. Mercy put his body back together, sure, but there's still no solution for being destroyed at a cellular level when your former headquarters explodes, along with all those fancy experimental weapons. He's not really alive, not when he can step through walls and move as shadows. Not when he doesn't need to eat, or sleep, or take a shit, or fuck, or any of it. All the bodily processes are there if he wants them, but they don't _matter_. They never will.

God, she even denied him the ability to age.

Now her silence is damning, infuriating. 

He scrutinizes her in the light. Her smooth face is unmarred by the years, and if she didn't have those telltale black studs on the far edges of her jaw, he'd never guess of the damage she'd done to herself, too. He thinks of a time where she'd cozied up to him drunk — most of her had been organic, then, her breasts supple, her thighs soft under the stroke of his hand. She'd been _Angela_. They'd been together, for a time, but that was in those halcyon days where the only thing more invigorating than warfare was being surrounded by confident peers in the physical prime of their lives. _Everyone_ was fucking back then. There'd been a lot of _nice_ people in Overwatch.

And that was decades ago. Most of their peers are riddled by age, but their ugliness today would be _natural_ if if their abiotic parts weren't so disconcerting.

"Anyhow," she continues. "That man, Oishi, he died after ninety days. You know, some people believed they kept him alive just to study the effects of radiation on human cells... very unethical and in clear violation of the oaths of health care! And yet, the resulting research changed how we understand cellular death –– no reputable man or woman of medicine would cite research of such miserable provenance, but it left its fingerprints everywhere. It changed how we did things. That poor man's suffering made so many things possible, and now many others will live."

"So because they were the first to torture a man and drag out his suffering, the next ones were just _inspired by_ ," he says. "In the clear. Never mind that the ones that come after didn't get a choice, either."

"You've seen too much to say such naive things," she says, silkily, but it comes through her teeth. "You're out living this life you have. If you wanted to fade away, you would. Something keeps you here."

He wonders when he should knock her out and start stripping her hard drives of her life's work. Or maybe he should just kill her, or come as close to killing her as he could –– put her in so many parts that no one could fit her back together again, rend her flesh until the little nanites in her skin have no hope of stitching her back together again. She'd deserve it, for what she's done to him, and for what she will inevitably do to others when their lives are about to be snuffed out. 

But he doesn't, not yet.

"I have work to do," he says.

"I heard what you did to Jack," she says. "Or what you tried to do, at least."

"Jack's dead," he says.

"Oh, don't be pedantic," Mercy says. "If you don't want to talk about Jack, then you can just say that. I'll respect your wishes."

 _Since when has she ever?_ The truth is she likely just doesn't want to know, as it would ruin her ability to be impartial. She _knows_ there won't be any dissuading him from his work, or his eventual annihilation of what's left of Overwatch. 

The only reason she'll debate him on his nihilism is that his nihilism implies her work is anything less than perfect.

"Then _don't_ talk about him."

Mercy sighs. He doesn't say anything to that.

 

* * *

 

Her files are downloading as they sit in silence. She hadn't put up much of a fuss, which tells Reaper she has back-ups. Numerous back-ups, likely, all of them on unauthorized servers. He doesn't care. He'll get them eventually, too.

"We could fix your face still," she says, sweetly. "You could go outside without a mask, be more man than wraith."

"And discard what's _left_ of my humanity?" he says. 

"Nonsense, Gabriel," Mercy says. "Humanity is not about biology anymore; perhaps mankind believed that a hundred years ago, but certainly not now!"

She is so painfully academic to think that regular every-day people have embraced the abiotic "human." But if he's told her once, he's told her a million times; she just doesn't _care._ And she continues anyway:

"There was a time where poor eyesight was a burden, a step short of blindness –– the invention of eyeglasses far off, and yet man needs his eyes to see what is before him and live his life. To trade these broken pieces in for something abiotic would be no more dehumanizing than choosing to wear glasses, or a prosthetic limb. It is merely a perk to be able to use it for warfare as well."

"Then my mask is my face," he says. "Drop it."

Mercy shrugs and then lapses into silence.

 

* * *

 

Mercy hops up to sit on the counter, folding one long leg over the other. She's wearing leggings. She's the only medical professional he's ever met who doesn't seem to wear either scrubs or loose sweatpants at all times –– there's no middle ground with the rest of them, it's just one or the other. On or off. But Mercy, no, he's never seen Mercy in anything but leggings. Leggings and compression shirts, sometimes layered under billowy tops. Those collared shirts drape over her like she's kept a shirt from the closet of every man she's ever slept with, each one a little different, a _slightly_ different style. 

She'd dressed like that even as Angela. It infuriates him a little that she pretends she still is that person. Angela is long dead, too, and he hates _Mercy._

"I came here to kill you. Considering that, this conversation is very cavalier," Reaper says. "Even for you."

Mercy shrugs.

"When have I ever risen to threat with violence?" she asks. "But even so. If it were a fight, the blows could damage my lab."

"You say that as if I wouldn't kill you in an instant," Reaper scoffs. "Long before your precious _lab_ would come to _any_ harm."

She leans forward on her hands, long legs still folded one over the other. When she lifts her chin in challenge, her face comes into the light and almost glows. It's a little grotesque how perfect her features are; it's unsettling when it should be enchanting. Something about the symmetry throws him off. People aren't supposed to look like that.

"Both of us owe our lives to this lab," she says. "With that in mind, you should consider it hallowed ground."

His gut simmers, roils.

He snaps.

He's in her face, suddenly, all black clouds and rolling darkness. She doesn't flinch, not even when he jabs both guns to her chest. He wants to shout at her, shake her: _you were a good doctor once, before you started fucking people up. Started fucking yourself up._

"I don't have a life to owe," Reaper spits. "I didn't agree to any _debts._ I didn't _ask_ for this."

"You didn't," she agrees.

Reaper gets three seconds of perfect, all-body vindication. And then:

"You couldn't; you were nearly gone, and certainly not capable of giving health care directives," she says, lightly, like it's nothing. He hadn't wanted to die, but he'd been so close he might as well have. "But the law implies you consent to treatment when it is a matter of life-threatening urgency, and so here you are. You owe your life to this lab."

"I don't care about the law," he says. And then, growled: "Tell me something?"

"What?" she says, leveling her eyes with his, even as the gun digs into her again.

"If I plugged you full of bullets right here, would you even die?"

"No," Mercy says. Her hands are moving, now, but he doesn't budge the gun, not even when she lays both hands on his wrist and holds him gently. "I wouldn't die any more than you would."

God.

"You ruined my life," he growls.

Her hands slide higher, to the gap between his gauntlets and his sleeve's end, where his skin is exposed. Her fingertips are firm on his skin. He doesn't like how possessive it feels –– she made him what he is, and so she feels a level of ownership. An artist and her creation. He supposes that he is her work, in some abstract way.

"I gave you a new one," she replies. "You just haven't done anything worthwhile with it."

"What would you have me do with it?"

"Embrace it," she says. "At least have some conviction."

" _Conviction?_ "

Mercy just leans in close. 

"Conviction," she repeats. "I did not save your life so you could throw it away on destroying all that I love, but we can agree to disagree on that. What I will not stand is this: I did not save your life so you could _resent_ it." 

"Shut up, Mercy," he says.

"I did not save your life so you could resent me," she presses.

He just pulls the trigger.

Mercy cries out and slumps a bit, and one of her heels strikes the side of the cabinet so loudly the sound echoes through the lab. He grips her and she him as she dies, but then she's not dying at all. In three seconds, she's recovered, her moans turning quickly to laughter. 

He watches, bracing her in his arms, as her flesh stitches back together through the new holes in her clothing. Little nanomachines, too small to really _see_ , cloning bio materials on the spot to re _grow_ her. She stays slouched in his arms, chest heaving, lips parted –– all he does is hold her, even while hating her.

"We're not so different," she says, breathlessly, and her forehead bumps dully against his mask.

They're not so different.

Behind their masks, both of them are already dead.

 


End file.
